# Russell Melick > Ground and Data Software, Muon Space Location: Burlingame, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/russellmelick I am a software engineer with significant experience in distributed, cloud based systems. I am looking to make a positive, lasting impact on the world, by working with a highly engaged and collaborative team. I have held a variety of roles, from individual contributor, to technical lead, to people manager of multiple teams. My experience has covered a broad range of areas, including application development, deployment and CI/CD, data engineering and reporting, ML modeling and pipelines. I am particularly interested in expanding our knowledge through space or ocean exploration, or in helping to combat climate change. Technically, I am a strong advocate for simplicity of design and starting as small as possible, while ensuring we've thought through the problem enough to understand the true requirements. I also focus on easing and simplifying communication, helping all sides understand each other and stay on the same page. I am a firm believer in the importance of a company's vision and mission, especially as a tool to unify the team and serve as a guiding light during the often chaotic planning process. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Muon Space Jan 2022 – Present | Mountain View, California, United States At Muon, we're helping fight climate change by building world’s most capable Earth-sensing satellite platform and data processing platform to go with it. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Vida Health Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area I help oversee the technical direction of Vida, with a focus on the backend. As an individual contributor, I'm also able to spend time solving specific problems, including: - creating our local development environment for microservices (see docker-local-dev project) - establishing and running our technical review process. We cover everything from KPIs and product requirements, to system architecture, to API specifications. - helping as we continue to upgrade, migrate, and simplify our technical systems - making significant contributions to our backend Django and Flask applications - helping identify, root cause, and fix performance bottlenecks Some of the key technologies I work with on a daily basis include: Python, Django, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, GCP, BigQuery, OpenAPI, Datadog, and PostgreSQL. (Note: Our career ladder was consolidated in 2021, and Sr. Staff SWE remapped to Staff SWE) ### Senior Manager, Infrastructure and Data Science @ Vida Health Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area From Sept. 2018 - Aug. 2020, I oversaw both our Data Science team and our Infrastructure team. As we grew, I focused on just the Infrastructure team. - Transitioned our Data Science team from focusing on analysis to Machine Learning, and helped them make an impact directly on our users. We launched several models, including the recommendations on the Home screen of the app, an enhanced provider matching algorithm, and a meal feedback and recommendation system. - Established our Infrastructure team, allowing backend engineers to work more closely together and define a long term vision, instead of being pulled from project to project. - Helped to define much of the hiring process across all of Engineering, while hiring across all different skill levels on my own teams. ### Manager, Data Science and Infrastructure @ Vida Health Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Vida Health Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area During my first year, I focused primarily on helping build key components of our data infrastructure - Established the "Foundational Metrics" for the company, defining key business KPIs like Active User - Integrated a feature flagging and experimentation platform (split.io) into our culture, helping improve reliability and allowing statistically validated experimentation for the first time. - Built our tracking pipeline (using open source Snowplow), and established the schema review process - Built our first version of a HIPAA compliant Data Warehouse using BigQuery, and a system of views to keep user data isolated and protected ### Software Architect @ Kiwigrid GmbH Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Dresden Area, Germany I took a year off from Silicon Valley to gain some fresh perspective and explore the green energy industry in Germany, one of the world leaders in renewable energy. Kiwigrid's main product is the "Energy-Manager", an IoT hub that offers two-way communication between their cloud and "dumb" devices such as solar panels, cogeneration plants, and home batteries. The cloud system allows a user to monitor and control the connected devices in real time. - Focused the development team on ownership of the complete product, including monitoring, final quality, and release schedule. This allowed the team to move from a 6 month to a 3 week release cycle and ship significantly higher quality features. - Introduced developer monitoring of the key business and customer metrics with grafana, leading to much earlier failure detection and quicker resolution. - Used docker containers as a way to simplify the deliverable handoff between development and operations. - Used Amazon Web Services (AWS) and docker compose to rapidly deploy and tear down test environments for specific customers, load tests, and developer proof of concept tests. - Contributed to several open source projects used by the team (Vert.x, Argus), and established a pattern of regularly merging changes back instead of relying on local forks. ### Staff Software Engineer / Data Scientist @ LinkedIn Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area Offline Relevance Team (focused on People You May Know) - Overhauled the offline machine learning pipeline to improve execution speed, ease of training new models, and speed of feature development - Explored new ways to combine real time online features with the offline modeling to improve relevance while keeping the learning pipeline scalable and reliable ### Senior Software Engineer @ LinkedIn Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco Bay Area Content and Community Team - Led the re-architecture of our backend systems to support active deployments to multiple data centers - Continued to scale the email personalization and delivery platform - Mentored team members to maintain a high bar of engineering excellence - Two time winner of group award for engineering excellence ### Software Engineer @ LinkedIn Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 I worked on Email within the Content and Community Team. * Redesigned the LinkedIn Today email * Migrated significant infrastructure to Hadoop for scalability * Helped design and implement next generation email development and distribution platform, with a focus on member experience and developer productivity. ### Clinic Team Leader / Hive Developer @ Facebook / Harvey Mudd College Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 As part of a clinic project at Harvey Mudd College sponsored by Facebook, I worked on improvements to the indexing framework in Hive, an Apache Software Foundation project. I led the team during the spring semester on work on automatic index usage and bitmap indexes. ### Software Developer @ Connective Arts LLC Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 Built a prototype website with Django to demonstrate the feasibility of using Twitter to power updates to other social media sites. Integrated with Facebook, MySpace, and Tumblr api's. ### Software Engineering Intern @ LinkedIn Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 Developed feature to enable members to share content with guests by email address. Dealt with abuse and spam concerns. ### Summer Researcher @ UCLA Applied Mathematics Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 • Group was exploring open problems in atmospheric science • Implemented and evaluated several numerical PDE solvers in MATLAB • Worked toward expanding previous two dimensional models to three dimensions ### Researcher @ Ariel Corporation Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 • Ariel is the world leader in reciprocating natural gas compressors • Developed simulation code for modeling bearing orbits and piston rings using MATLAB • Created graphical user interface for bearing simulation code ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science Harvey Mudd College ### Mount Vernon High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/russellmelick --- Source: https://flows.cv/russellmelick JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/russellmelick/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11